Wendy

By Walter Scott. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Softcover, 216 pages, B&W, 2021

The first volume of the outrageously funny and painfully relatable satire of an aspiring artist and millennial culture

Walter Scott’s Wendy comics have become a critical sensation, with rave reviews in The New Yorker and The Guardian, and an appearance in the Best American Comics anthology. Learn Wendy’s origin story as Scott hilariously plumbs millennial culture, creative ennui, and the nepotism of the art world’s institutions.

Wendy’s an aspiring artist in a party city, and she’s in a rut. She spends her time snorting mdma in gallery bathrooms and watching Nurse Jackie reruns on her laptop while hungover. So when she’s accepted into the prestigious Flojo Island residency, Wendy vows to buckle down and get working. But during the remote, woodsy residency, Wendy and her collaborator/bff Winona put on a performance piece that becomes the centre of an art world controversy, and so Wendy returns to Montreal, getting a job in a coffee shop to make ends meet.

With Wendy, Scott launches the Wendyverse, brimming with painfully relatable characters like the back-stabbing frenemy Tina, the name-dropping Paloma, the cool drummer Wendy obsesses over, Jeff, and of course, our treasured Wendy, the hot mess we can’t live without. In blunt, laugh out loud funny vignettes with perfect punchlines, Scott illuminates the opacity of artspeak and the ceaseless anxieties plaguing a largely privileged generation.

"I thought I regretted not going to art school until a friend introduced me to Walter Scott’s Wendy comic book series... Wendyskewers art school and young adulthood alike via the lens of [its] titular protagonist."—New York Times

"I am blown away by Walter Scott's Wendy series."—Zadie Smith

"Wendy's lust for life is inseparable from her knee-jerk self-destruction."—The New Yorker

"Winningly messy."—The Guardian

"The art school party girl who is perhaps the real voice of our generation (sorry Lena Dunham)."—Vice